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Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service

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vSphere+ and vSAN+ was launched last year as a new cloud service and the unit of consumption are CPU cores, which needs to be determined prior to purchasing a subscription for either cloud services. To help customers inventory their existing vSphere and vSAN CPU core usage, especially useful for general visibility and planning purposes, I had developed a simple PowerCLI function that was published last year as a VMware KB article (89116).

In recent weeks, I had noticed an increased number of inquiries from our field and customers on how to assess their existing vSphere and vSAN environment for transition to vSphere+ and vSAN+ and I realized that many folks may not have been aware of the scripts and the KB article that was available.

Once you have downloaded the PowerCLI script, imported the function and connect to an existing vCenter Server environment, you can then use the Get-vSpherePlusCPUSocketToCoreUsage function which will automatically retrieve all ESXi hosts within your vCenter Server and display the current CPU core usage, vSphere+ Cores and vSAN+ Cores required as shown in the example screenshot below.

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How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh?

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After documenting the process for bootstrapping vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) using my Intel NUC 12 Pro, I was looking for an easier way to share my physical vSAN storage, which is powered by a single Supermicro E200-8D, to other physical ESXi hosts for testing purposes.

I had recently been playing with the vSAN HCI Mesh feature, which was launched back in 2020, as I was running out of spare NVMe devices when needing to test different physical hardware kits. While my use case for the storage is typically short lived, it means I do not have to play musical chairs with the limited number of NVMe devices I have installed in the various kits I have.

The vSphere UI in vCenter Server already provides a very simple workflow to mount a remote vSAN storage on an ESXi compute-only node, but I was also looking at this from a bootstrapping point of view and what if vCenter Server was not deployed or even available? Could I still make this work? After a bit of trial and error, I was able to figure out this can be accomplished by using a series of ESXCLI commands!

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Quick Tip - How to check if vSAN TRIM/UNMAP is enabled in VMware Cloud on AWS Cluster?

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While the original question was for checking whether a specific VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) cluster has the vSAN TRIIM/UNMAP feature enabled, the solutions below is applicable to any recent vSAN 7.x or 8.x deployment. There are two ways you check, either using the vSphere UI by selecting the cluster and navigating to Configure->vSAN->Services and expanding the Advanced Options tile or simply leveraging PowerCLI and the vSAN API to retrieve the exact same information.

vSphere UI

vSAN API using PowerCLI

$clusterName = "Cluster-1"
$vsanConfigSystem = Get-VsanView -Id VsanVcClusterConfigSystem-vsan-cluster-config-system
$clusterMoRef = (Get-Cluster $clusterName).ExtensionData.MoRef
$vsanConfigSystem.VsanClusterGetConfig($clusterMoRef).unmapConfig